Zayed International Airport

Zayed International Airport (formerly Abu Dhabi International) is the flagship gateway to the UAE capital. Its centrepiece, Terminal A, is a 742,000-square-metre structure — making it one of the largest single airport terminal buildings ever built. Behind its soaring form is a sustainability brief anchored in the Estidama Pearl Rating System, Abu Dhabi's own mandatory green building code.

Why Estidama, not LEED

Abu Dhabi requires every new building to achieve at least a 1 Pearl rating under the Estidama Pearl Building Rating System, and government projects must reach at least 2 Pearls. Unlike LEED — which is international and voluntary — Estidama is a mandatory local code specifically calibrated to Abu Dhabi's hot arid climate, high cooling loads, and water scarcity.

Terminal A pursued a 3 Pearl Design Rating, exceeding the minimum and signaling Abu Dhabi's intent to hold its own aviation infrastructure to a higher bar than it requires of private developers. The 3 Pearl threshold demands meaningful gains on energy modelling, indoor environmental quality, and resource efficiency — it's not a box-ticking exercise.

What's actually in the building

A few of the sustainability features that show up in public disclosures:

• A climate-responsive façade engineered to cope with extreme solar gains across the building's massive surface area, integrating shading and high-performance glazing
• 75,000 tonnes of structural steel, with approximately 90% sourced from recycled content — a substantial embodied-carbon reduction for a project of this scale
• Abu Dhabi's largest solar-powered car park, using PV canopies to generate renewable electricity while also shading vehicles (a double win in the Gulf climate)
• An indoor park irrigated with recycled water, demonstrating closed-loop water design for a landscape feature
• Energy-efficient HVAC, lighting, and control systems designed to meet Estidama's energy credits under PBRS

The lesson for Gulf infrastructure

Airports are among the hardest building types to certify because their operational profile (24/7 HVAC, high occupant turnover, unique security and life-safety constraints) breaks a lot of generic assumptions in rating systems. Terminal A's 3 Pearl achievement demonstrates that these constraints can be worked with rather than around — and that Estidama, developed specifically for Abu Dhabi's conditions, is flexible enough to rate a project of extreme scale and complexity.

For developers in Abu Dhabi working on any large public-sector building, Terminal A is the reference point: if it can hit 3 Pearls at 742,000 m², the benchmark for the rest of the market moves up.

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